Project Summary - ARMACAD 2017...2015/02/02 · Digital Archive of Massachusetts Antislavery and...

Yale University, Yale Indian Papers Project

proposalcoversheet-20150930.pdf

The Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College for the Radcliffe

Institute for Advanced Study

The Digital Archive of Native American Petitions in Massachusetts

A project to digitize approximately 4,500 petitions from and about

Native American peoples throughout the Northeast that are held at

the Massachusetts Archives of the Commonwealth in Boston. At

least one-third of these petitions are authored by Native people

themselves and many more are co-authored. Others express the

views of non-Native peoples about issues affecting American Indian

life. Because Massachusetts was an important trading and

diplomatic space, the petitions come from the Great Lakes,

contemporary Canada, Maine, and the Connecticut and Hudson

River Valleys. The petitions, already having been initially processed,

will be thoroughly catalogued with metadata information, and will then

be digitized and rehoused with conservation measures. The digital

repository will be created at Harvard’s Dataverse and replicated at

Yale. This free, publicly accessible resource will enrich Native

American studies, American history, anthropology and other

humanistic pursuits.

$275,795

01/01/2016

06/30/2017

Yes

Please review the Application Guidelines for important details regarding the information requested in this

application. Fields marked with an asterisk are required.

Project Summary

Is this a collaborative project?

If so, include the names of the collaborating institutions below. Use the green add button to list additional partners

as needed.

Collaborating Institutions (if applicable)

Cover Sheet

Applicant Institution

Collection/Project Title

Project Summary

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Institution

ThePresidentsandFellowsofHarvardCollegefortheRadcliffeInstituteforAdvancedStudyCarpent 1/19

http://www.clir.org/hiddencollections/applicants/applicantguidelines.html

4500

items

manuscripts

13500

lossless JPEG2000 files

400 dpi

We have individually accounted for at least 2800 petitions regarding

Native Americans or from Native American peoples for the post-

colonial period of Massachusetts. Extrapolating from previous work

with the colonial period, and extending our extrapolations to post-

1780 collections, not yet consulted, we come to the number of 4,500

Native American petitions with a 95% confidential interval of 4,200 to

4,800. Because it is based upon extrapolations from known

documents in the colonial and post-colonial records, and because we

have already searched through most of the post-1780 records, our

estimate of 4,500 petitions is both reasonable and cautious.

Images will be captured at 400 dpi and be processed in batches to

closely match the original materials using color and tonal corrections

derived from a representative sample.

Materials to be digitized

Enter below the estimated quantities and select the units of measurement and material types that most

specifically describe the extent of original materials that will be digitized during the project. You may add as many

different measurement/material types as you like by clicking the green add button found below this section, but

each individual item should be accounted for in only one category.

If the quantities provided are rough estimates rather than precise descriptions, explain the method used for

estimating those quantities in the space provided for additional information.

Materials

Quantities, Formats, and Specifications of Digital Files to be Created during the Project

Enter estimated quantities of uniquely described digital files to be created through digitization, as well as the

relevant digital format(s) created and technical specifications for those formats (dpi, minimum pixel dimensions,

bit-depth, optical density, etc.).

If additional files are to be derived from those created in the digitization process for the purposes of backup,

preservation and/or access, do not count these derivative files or formats in the totals entered; you may describe

any derivative formats to be created and the purposes these will serve in the space provided for additional

information.

Digital Files to be Created

Catalogs/repositories/services

Provide names and complete URL(s) for the portals through which digitized content will be available to

researchers and the general public.

Amount of Materials

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Harvard Dataverse

http://dataverse.org/

Yale Indian Papers Project

http://findit.library.yale.edu/yipp via the Project’s home page,

www.yipp.yale.edu

We seek to digitize petitions of two sorts: (1) petitions sent by Native

American individuals, villages, groups and nations to Massachusetts

colonial and state officials, most commonly the General Court of

Massachusetts (which includes the Massachusetts House of

Representatives and the Massachusetts Senate), and (2) petitions

sent by non-Native Americans that concern Native American

peoples, sent to the same bodies. We have completed a preliminary

survey of the petitions in the collection running from colonial

materials (roughly 1640) to the Reconstruction period (1870) and

have located over 2,800 such petitions. Our extrapolations for

documentary collections not yet covered suggest a total of

approximately 4,500 petitions. These collections include extensive

documents drafted and signed by Abenaki, Chappaquiddick,

Maliseet, Mohawk, Mohegan, Nipmuc, Penobscot, Pequot,

Punkapoag, Wampanoag and other Native American peoples. In the

documents we have already located, we have witnessed petitions

concerning or from 72 different Native American nations. The

petitions concern a vast array of issues, including land rights, water

rights and treaties; religion and religious practices of Native

Americans; colonial and early U.S. state policies relating to Indian

peoples; relations among Native Americans and colonial populations;

relations amongst the various Native American communities and

tribes; slavery and servitude among Native Americans; the attitudes

and ideologies of non-Native Americans toward American Indians;

the cultural and political beliefs and practices of Native American

peoples, including diplomacy and legal struggles, from the Great

Lakes through contemporary Quebec and Maine, through the Hudson

and Connecticut River Valleys to Massachusetts. A range of

historical events and patterns are concerned, including the Mashpee

Revolt of 1833, the Iroquois Confederacy and its relations with

colonial Massachusetts and England and France; health and public

health issues among Native Americans; struggles over land and

dispossession, and the cultural, social and political organization (and

reorganization) of American Indian peoples.

Portals

Description of Content: Public

Description of materials

Provide a brief narrative description of the materials nominated for digitization, including their provenance,

relevant associated people, organizations, events, and/or subjects.

Portal

URL

Portal

URL

Description


The petitions concern or were sent from Native peoples in

Massachusetts, Maine (part of Massachusetts until 1820), the

Connecticut and Hudson River valleys, elsewhere in the Northeast,

and the Great Lakes region. Boston was an important crossroads for

Native peoples, and petitions come from peoples living hundreds of

miles away.

1640 AD – 1870 AD

The materials are currently arranged in three separate collections of

the Massachusetts Archives: (1) the colonial papers of the Archives,

which extend from the 1640s to 1780, (2) the papers of the

Massachusetts House of Representatives, and (3) the papers of the

Massachusetts Senate. The second and third of these series

comprise the papers of the Massachusetts General Court, which is

the name for the Massachusetts state legislature. Within the papers

of the Massachusetts House and Senate, the records are divided

into those pertaining to passed legislation (bills that were voted out

of the chambers and that often became law) and unpassed

legislation. Petitions records are very common in both series, but as

colonial and state legislatures would act on only a fraction of the

thousands of petitions sent to them, the petitions in the unpassed

legislation series are of particular importance. We emphasize,

furthermore, that the current arrangement of these records, combined

with the limited preservation and access resources at the

Massachusetts Archives, makes scholarly and public access to

these materials very difficult and highly costly for scholars, students

and the public.

Geographic Scope

Describe the range of geographic regions represented in the nominated collection(s).

Date range of materials to be digitized

Enter the earliest and latest dates the original materials in the nominated collection(s) were created, in whole

years. Dates should be formatted as YYYY BC/AD – YYYY BC/AD (e.g. 356 BC - 1542 AD).

Collection level descriptions (if applicable)

If applicable, identify and provide the URL(s) for any collection-level descriptions currently available online.

Collection URL(s)

Description of Content: Confidential

Current arrangement and description(s) of materials to be digitized

Provide a brief narrative that summarizes the physical arrangement and the level(s) of processing, cataloging, or

other descriptive work that has previously been done for the nominated collection(s). Include the date(s) this

descriptive work took place and the standard(s) and/or current format(s) of the records that were created.

Geographic scope

Date range of materials

Collection name(s)

Collection URL

Current Arrangement


According to Massachusetts State Archivists Michael Comeau and

Martha Clark, and according to Harvard University Archivist Nicole

Topich (who served as the Project Archivist for the NEH-funded

Digital Archive of Massachusetts Antislavery and Anti-Segregation

Petitions), the Native American petitions materials at the

Massachusetts Archives of the Commonwealth are in variable

condition. Some of the older materials are better preserved and in

some cases have been microfilmed, though the quality of this

microfilm is variable and often quite poor. However, hundreds of the

late 18th century and 19th century materials have not been opened

since they were originally deposited in the Archives and, unless

digitized soon, will possibly be lost in coming decades. We

emphasize, again, that the current arrangement of these records,

combined with the limited preservation and access resources at the

Massachusetts Archives, makes scholarly and public access to

these materials very difficult and highly costly for scholars, students

and the public. In their present state, large-scale access would be

infeasible and would certainly result in depreciation or destruction of

the petitions. Our previous work producing the Digital Archive of

Massachusetts makes us confident that mass digitization with

preservation is possible.

As with the Digital Archive of Massachusetts Antislavery and Anti-

Segregation Petitions, each petition identified for possible digitization

will be reviewed by curatorial staff and the Project Archivist to

assess whether any conservation issues are relevant. The

Massachusetts Archives directly oversees and coordinates the

transportation of all physical petition documents to and from the

Harvard University Libraries, where the digitization takes place. The

Project Archivist, working at the Massachusetts State Archives, will

prepare all materials for transport and digitization at the Harvard

University Imaging Services Department by ensuring that each

document is unfolded and rehoused to balance needs for safe

handling and high production. Continuing the digitization workflows

from the previous NEH project will ensure the production of

standards-compliant page images and structural metadata files that

together will compromise complete, properly sequenced, and

navigable digital objects in web-based delivery services. Rehousing

occurs in acid-free containers according to the approved practices of

the Massachusetts Archives of the Commonwealth. All maintenance

will be conducted by the Massachusetts Archives of the

Commonwealth, which is well-known for the breadth and preservation

of its collections.

Current condition and housing of materials to be digitized and plans for their conservation and

preservation

Describe the current condition and housing of the materials to be digitized, including the means through which this

condition has been assessed. Identify the individual or individuals responsible for this assessment and

approximately when the assessment took place. Describe the strategies to be employed for stabilization,

conservation, and/or preservation of the materials, including the means through which this work will be supported

and sustained long-term. Explain the environmental provisions made for the long-term management of the source

materials and the strategy for responding to requests for access to them.

Current Condition


Images from Native American petitions in the Massachusetts

Archives, both colonial and post-1780. Descriptions of each image,

as well as location, are included in the caption that accompanies the

image. These images are primarily of petitions from or representing

Native American peoples. We have compressed the PDF file due to

space constraints.

clir-images.compressed.pdf

Yes

Confirmed

Confirmed

Confirmed

Representative samples of materials to be digitized (max. 10 pages, 12 MB, .pdf format only)

Upload a PDF document containing images of up to ten (10) selected items from the collection(s) to be digitized,

and provide a brief description of the contents of the file, below. Each image should be accompanied by a

description and full citation that includes the name of the holding institution, the collection title, any identification

numbers or shelfmarks, and any available information about rights or licensing. The document may contain

embedded URLs linking to additional content, such as sample audio or audiovisual files, but must contain

samples of no more than ten items.

May CLIR excerpt from and display some portion of these representative samples within the Hidden

Collections Registry, elsewhere on CLIR’s website, or in program-related social media?

If you select "Yes" but would prefer that some representative samples be displayed but not others, note below

which specific samples CLIR has permission to share.

Rights, Ethics, and Re-Use

All parties to this proposal understand that as a condition of acceptance of any Digitizing Hidden Special

Collections and Archives award from CLIR, all recipient institutions and collaborating partner organizations will be

required to sign and execute the program’s intellectual property agreement.


Collections and Archives award from CLIR, all metadata created in the course of funded project activities must be

dedicated to the public domain under a CC0 Creative Commons license.


Collections and Archives award from CLIR, recipient institutions, including partnering institutions in cases of

collaborative projects, must not claim additional rights or impose additional access fees or restrictions to the

digital files created through the project, beyond those already required by law or existing agreements. Materials

that are in the public domain in analog form must continue to be in the public domain once they have been

digitized. CLIR strongly encourages grant recipients to share digital copies as public domain resources and/or with

Creative Commons licenses, as appropriate.

Description of Samples

Samples (.pdf format only)

Yes/No

Selected Permissions (if

applicable)

Tick to confirm:

Tick to confirm:

Tick to confirm:


http://www.clir.org/hiddencollections/applicants/applicant-documents/model-ip-agreement

https://creativecommons.org/about/cc0

Some of the content within the collections nominated for digitization

contains private or other potentially sensitive information that poses

legal or ethical concerns related to providing access to the digital

copies created through this project.

Rights, Ethics and Re-Use Statement -- The Digital Archive of

Massachusetts Native American Petitions.pdf

Historical research demonstrates that Native peoples expressed their

grievances, their requests, their history and indeed their identities in

petitions sent to government officials. Petitions became vehicles to

document and contest the mass dispossession of Native peoples

from their lands and communities. They also became vehicles for

diplomacy and mobilization of Native communities. Yet only recently

has the historical community become aware of the massive amount

of petitions collections – most never examined since their disposition

by colonial and state legislatures – available in North American

archives.

The history of Native American peoples has been richly studied, but

the many thousands of petitions from Native peoples to state and

national legislatures and other government bodies have been little

examined. Only recently have works such as those by Micah

Pawling and Maxime Gohier begun to directly examine Native

American petitioning campaigns and petitions materials. Our

analysis of materials located in the Massachusetts Archives and the

National Archives suggests that there are thousands of petitions

drawn up, circulated, signed and sent by Native peoples that have

not been opened since their deposit in archival collections. In

hundreds of cases these petitions have laid idle, unread, unopened

and deteriorating for 150 or even more than 200 years.

Our digitization project will help to create new knowledge by making

thousands of petitions difficult to locate and access available in two

Applicants who tick any of the four boxes below should provide details clarifying their responses in the Rights,

Ethics, and Re-Use Statement.

Rights, Ethics, and Re-Use statement (max. 3 pp, 2MB, .pdf format only)

Upload a description (maximum 3 pages) that summarizes all known rights, embargoes, and access or legal

restrictions applicable to the source materials to be digitized and describes how these rights, embargoes, or

restrictions will be communicated to the public. Identify and explain any ethical considerations that affect access

to or re-use of the digital copies. Explain the basis upon which the proposed activities are justifiably legal and

ethical, and the specific terms under which users of the collections will be able to access and re-use the digital

copies created through the project. Explain and justify any institutional watermarks incorporated into copies made

accessible to users and any fees charged for re-use. Describe any other measures to be taken to restrict access

to or re-use of the digital copies in order to comply with the law or with applicable, pre-existing agreements or

contracts.

Value and National Significance

Describe the impact of the proposed project upon scholarship, and explain why digitization is the most

appropriate means to maximize the value and significance of the materials to scholars and students.

Address the importance of the collections to teaching, research, and the creation of new knowledge.

Tick all that apply:

Statement (.pdf format only)

Value and National Significance

Statement


different digital repositories. The ready availability of petitions from

dozens of Northeastern peoples – ranging for the Six Nations of

Iroquoia to Abenaki peoples in modern-day Maine, Vermont and

Quebec, to Pequot, Maliseet, Mohegan, Nipmuc, Wampanoag, and

other peoples in what is now Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode

Island – will create an unprecedented archive of petitions materials

that spans three centuries.

The records will also be useful to historians and students examining

the colonial, legal and environmental history of North America.

Petitions concerning land rights and use rights to waterscapes are

very common in these collections.

We know from experience that, once made available, these petition

materials will be readily used by students, teachers and scholars.

With the initial version of the Massachusetts Archive of Antislavery

and Anti-Segregation Petitions released at the end of February 2015,

the petitions are already being downloaded approximately 40 times a

month, and this rate will only increase as the visual interface is

improved.

As Native American peoples continue to teach their own histories,

our project will be all the more important to diverse audiences of

students and scholars. Professor Carpenter and Dr. Grant-Costa

have already consulted with representatives of the Seneca Nation,

Wampanoag communities and many other Northeastern American

Indian tribes and their representatives on petitions we have found.

The ability of Native peoples to use these documents will greatly

enhance the teaching of Native American history in schools,

universities and on Indian lands, and will also create avenues for

genealogical and legal research. And in recent years, Native people

have used some of these petitions in their federal recognition

applications and in reconstructing their tribal histories.

Materials will be stored and available at two academic institutions.

We will produce a digital archive that is freely available to the public

on the publicly-accessible Dataverse platform at Harvard, where

Upload three letters of scholarly support for your project (max. 10MB, .pdf format only).

Project Context and Impact

List and describe all envisioned project deliverables. Explain the means through which each will be

available to the public, and any applicable conditions or terms limiting their availability.

Describe all expected outcomes, how each will be made accessible to others, and under what conditions.

Deliverables will include the digital surrogates created during the project and related metadata, and they may also

include aggregations of those files and metadata with related collections, catalog records, finding aids, authority

files, description and digitization manuals, training materials, new or improved software tools, reference guides, or

other outcomes of the proposed project. Address any relevant restrictions or licensing terms not already explained

in the intellectual property statement.

Deliverables


images from approximately 4,500 petitions that span the early

colonial period to the Reconstruction period will be stored, and at the

Yale Indian Papers Project platform at Yale.

We estimate that 13,500 images will be created and eventually

stored in this Archive. Each petition image, which includes not only

the petition’s prayer but also its signatory list, will record the author

or authors of the petition, the Native tribes and/or communities from

which it came (in ways that permit geocoding), important place-

names or locations mentioned in the petition (with geocoding again

possible), the date of the petition, the chamber and/or committee or

legislator to which it was sent, the names of the first five signatories

on the petition, and its eventual disposition.

Crucially, our digital archive will be organized upon a granular

metadata resource. We will organize our metadata so as to allow for

aggregate description and statistical analysis can be performed to

study the petitions as a whole and in subsets from particular periods

or concerning particular Native nations in the Northeast. In addition,

we will combine these facilities with information that will permit easy

geocoding of many of the petitions based upon historical knowledge

of the populations sending them as well as descriptions of important

place names. (The historical experience of Dr. Grant-Costa and

collaborators such as tribal historians will be crucial to the success

of this enterprise).

As an example of the deliverables, we point to the Digital Archive of

Massachusetts Antislavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions

(http://thedata.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/antislaverypetitionsma), recently

launched at the end of February 2015. Like the Digital Archive of

Antislavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions, our proposed Digital

Archive of Native American Petitions will be housed in Harvard’s

Dataverse platform and will be searchable using terms and,

eventually, a visual interface permitting geographic, nation/tribe-

based, and biographically-based browsing of the petitions according

to place names and historical persons (prototype map can be found:

http://antislaverypetitions.pythonanywhere.com/map). The same

materials will also be available at the Yale Indian Papers Project’s

web platform and interact with the large corpus of Native materials

there.

The number of petitions by and relating to Native Americans that we

seek to digitize is greater than in the Digital Archive of

Massachusetts Antislavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions, but

because anti-slavery and anti-segregation petitions often had

extensive signatory lists, we can predict confidently that the number

of images will be smaller than in the earlier project as the signatory

lists for Native American petitions are not as extensive.

The application represents a collaborative between two institutions,

the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, which houses an

ongoing project on the study of petitions in North America, and the

Yale Indian Papers Project (YIPP), a Yale University-based scholarly

editing and digital humanities initiative focused on the documentary

Describe all prior initiatives, experiences, or research activities that have directly informed the design of

the project, including any notable innovations or practices that will make the proposed approach

particularly efficient, ground-breaking and/or cost-effective.

Project Context


history of New England Native peoples.

Harvard University has already collaborated with the Massachusetts

Archives to produce a digital petitions archive. In February 2015, we

launched the Digital Archive of Massachusetts Antislavery and Anti-

Segregation Petitions

(http://thedata.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/antislaverypetitionsma), which

offers easy and free public access to more than 3,500 antislavery

and anti-segregation petitions sent to the Massachusetts legislatures

from the 1640s to 1870. Critical to this project was the full

digitization of the entire signatory list of these petitions, making more

than 22,000 digital images stored online.

The Digital Archive of Massachusetts Antislavery and Anti-

Segregation Petitions is organized upon a highly granular metadata

resource, which connects each petition image to meta-data

describing the petition’s prayer and signatory list. This meta-data

includes a description of the request of grievance expressed by the

petitioners, the identity of the petitioners (individuals, groups, leader,

tribe and nation), the geographic location from which the petition was

sent, the date of the petition, the eventual disposition of the petition

(where this can be identified), the committee and chamber to which

the petition was sent, the first five signatories of the petition and

other relevant material.

At Harvard, Professor Carpenter and colleagues at the Radcliffe

Institute and in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences have for ten years

been working to make available images and other data relating to the

wide variety of petitioning activity in North America. In the Fall of

2014 he and his colleagues released a database on all currently

archived anti-slavery petitions sent to the U.S. House of

Representatives between 1833 and 1845 (available on Harvard’s

Dataverse at

http://thedata.harvard.edu/dvn/faces/study/StudyPage.xhtml?

globalId=doi:10.7910/DVN/27176&studyListingIndex=1_0f4ddc95a8bbe4f142d9ae55f184).

As part of our previous work, we have already produced an initial

website from which we will premise the model for our Digital Archive

of Native American Petitions. In addition, we have already produced

a preliminary visual interface for the antislavery petitions digital

archive, upon which we will improve for the current project.

The Yale Indian Papers Project has been at Yale University since

2003. With a focus on the four essential elements of the learned

process—collections, scholars, publications, and collaboration—the

Project accomplishes its mission by locating, digitizing, transcribing,

and annotating a wide variety of primary source materials by, on, or

about New England Indians. Its archives represent a foundational set

of international documents exploring various aspects of nearly four

centuries of Native life, including history, politics, religion, law, and

culture, as well as addressing issues of community, land, gender,

race, identity, migration, and sovereignty. To facilitate greater

intellectual access to the materials, the Project incorporates a broad

array of specialists from various academic disciplines, insuring a

balance of crucial perspectives in annotation and related

commentary. An example of its work can be found at

http://yipp.yale.edu/annotated-transcription/digcoll4471497-0.


We plan extensive outreach and marketing to three communities: (1)

networks of historians, Native American studies specialists,

anthropologists and other scholars whose research and writing will

use these petitions; (2) schools and universities for which the Native

American petitions can be used as educational and cultural

materials, and (3) Native American communities and institutions.

Our first audience concerns professional scholars, other humanists

and genealogists whose research and writing will use these petitions.

As for our previously completed Digital Archive of Massachusetts

Antislavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions and the continuing work

of the Yale Indian Papers Project, we will use networks of

researchers and students and scholars of history to spread the word.

We will also plan presentations at the National American Indian

Studies Association (NAISA), the Omohundro Conference on Early

American History, Native American cultural and historical events

where scholars and students gather, and historical societies where

interested scholars and students will likely attend.

Our second audience comprises the schools, universities, museums

and cultural heritage institutions where teaching, instruction and

collaborative learning about Native American and colonial North

American history occur. In this respect, we will plan outreach and

marketing to schools that lie especially but not only in New England.

For both, we plan an aggressive campaign using social media. For

our Digital Archive on Antislavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions,

both the availability of the Digital Archive and the launch event were

widely tweeted and diffused on list-servers for historical societies,

networks of African-American Studies specialists, genealogical

societies, and groups studying slavery and abolition in North

America.

Our third audience concerns the Native peoples whose ancestors

signed these petitions or who were the subject of these documents.

The Yale Indian Papers Project already enjoys a substantial

professional relationship with tribal governments, tribal scholars, and

tribal elders. We are already in contact with several leaders of Native

American communities that descend from and continue to represent

the tribes that signed these petitions (the Mashpee Wampanoag, the

Chappaquiddick Wampanoag and the Mohegan Nation). We also plan

to take the archive “on the road” to organizations and villages of

Native peoples throughout contemporary New England, Quebec, and

some of the Great Lakes regions (for instance the Six Nations of

Iroquoia), whose ancestors worked to assemble and transmit these

petitions.

We emphasize that, in accordance with the Society of American

Archivists' Native American Protocols for Archival Materials, we will

consult with tribal officials (including tribal historic preservation

officers) before and during all such outreach activities. These

consultation activities have already begun (see attached letters of

tribal support, for example).

Describe all outreach and marketing activities planned to maximize the impact of the project, for both

scholarly and professional communities of interest.

Outreach and Marketing


As part of the work of the Yale Indian Papers Project, many petitions

and documents relating to American Indians in the Connecticut and

Connecticut River Valley region have been digitized, and we plan to

connect the digitized petitions from Massachusetts to these

documents, both on the basis of the tribes to which they pertain and

on the basis of common geographical and historical references

(particular place names, villages, treaty negotiations or conflicts, for

example).

We are currently planning a long-term collaboration between

Harvard/Radcliffe and the Yale Indian Papers Project on the creation

of scholarly and educational resources and platforms for Native

American petitioning and politics. This includes, at its core,

digitization of Native American petitions in other areas, including

other state and local archives in the Northeast and Great Lakes

regions. We also hope to link up the various databases of Native

petitions to create a common media platform where the images can

be searched, where scholars and students can make linkages

across the documents and across Native American histories and

people, and where educational and scholarly materials can be

produced, enhanced and diffused. Our collaboration will embed an

educational component (including outreach to Native American

communities, including tribal leaders and elders and Native American

organizations) as well as a research component (including outreach

to tribal historians, scholars of Native American Studies and

American history as well as in other fields).

None of these future initiatives will be able to succeed without

building an initial digital archive that can (a) serve as a model for

future efforts, (b) serve as a resource for building scholarly resources

and a corpus of research on Native American petitions, and (c) serve

as a platform for the development and enhancement of educational

materials for the teaching of Native American history and culture, as

well as American history generally.

Project Plan for the Digital Archive of Native American Petitions in

Massachusetts.pdf

Describe any collections related to the materials nominated for digitization and describe any plans for

creating meaningful linkages to those collections.

Applicants should be as specific as possible in naming these related collections. Related collections may be held

by the applicant or partner institutions, or by other institutions not participating directly in the project.

Describe any future initiatives that would be made possible by the completion of project work.

Project Design

Upload a project plan with timeline that includes all major project activities and deliverables, including a

project timeline with deliverable deadlines (max. 3 pages, 2MB, .pdf format only).

The timeline for the project should be as explicit as possible, identifying major activities to be undertaken during

each quarter of the proposed grant term and naming the parties who will participate in those activities.

Related Collections

Future Initiatives

Project Plan (.pdf format only)


ProjectPlanAppendix.xlsx

Project Technical Plan.pdf

Professor Carpenter has led historical research projects on North

American petitions for a decade, and has already managed and led

the development of one of the most complete and user-friendly

digital archives for petitions collections in existence, having served

as PI of the NEH-funded Digital Archive for Massachusetts

Antislavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions. Dr. Grant-Costa has

spent over a decade involved in the identification, partial digitization,

transcription and annotation of important historical documents

relating to and authored by Native American peoples, especially in

the Northeast. Nicole Topich served as Project Archivist for the

Digital Archive of Massachusetts Antislavery and Anti-Segregation

Petitions, and has unsurpassed knowledge of the legislative and

petitions collections of the Massachusetts Archives of the

Commonwealth.

carpenterCV-2015.pdf

Grant-Costa_CV_2015.pdf

Topich-CV-20150426.pdf

Staff will include the PIs Dr. Carpenter and Dr. Grant-Costa, the

Project Archivist (Nicole Topich), Assistant Executive Editor (Tobias

Project plan appendix (max. 2MB, .pdf, .xls or .xlsx format only)

Upload a project plan appendix* specifying in greater detail the collections to be digitized for the project, the

relevant holding institution, and the partners who will be responsible for digitization, description, and the long-term

maintenance of the digital files that will be created (no page limit, .pdf, .xls or .xlsx format only).

NOTE: The appendix must follow CLIR's template, which can be found here. Non-compliant appendices will be

removed prior to review and may result in the application being rendered ineligible for review and funding.

*This document is required for collaborative projects; optional for all other projects.

Technical Plan (max. 4 pages, 5MB, .pdf format only)

Upload a document detailing your proposed technical approach, including a description and justification for the

proposed workflow that clearly identifies all tools, systems, standards, and technologies to be employed in the

project.

Principal Investigators/Primary Staff

Briefly describe the relevant qualifications of up to three individuals who will contribute substantially to the project.

The qualifications of all named Principal Investigators (PIs) must be included here. If the project includes fewer

than three PIs, applicants may optionally use this space to describe other important staff members' qualifications.

Upload resumes/CVs for these individuals below (.pdf, .doc, or .docx format only). In the event that a person

holding major responsibility for the project has not yet been identified, applicants may upload a job description for

that unidentified person’s role.

Staffing

How many staff will be assigned to this project? You may include students and volunteers in this list.

Project Plan Appendix (.pdf, .xls,

.xlsx)

Technical Approach (.pdf format

only)

Staff Qualifications

Resume #1 (.pdf, .doc,.docx)



Staffing


http://www.clir.org/hiddencollections/applicants/projectplanappendix

Glaza), the staff of the Harvard University Library Digitization Lab

(led by Margaret Hale), a programmer (Garth Griffin), and several

volunteers and students working for Dr. Carpenter and for Radcliffe.

While a project like this customarily requires significant training and

expertise, we do not believe that any new training for the Harvard

and Yale investigators will be required for this particular digitization

project. The reason is that we are using the model for the recently

released Digital Archive of Massachusetts Anti-Slavery and Anti-

Segregation Petitions, which involved the same archivists working

with the same record groups at the Massachusetts Archives, the

same Digital Lab of the Harvard Library, the same programmer

(Garth Griffin) and the same digital repository (Dataverse).

The one area where particular expertise is required is in the study of

Native American history and culture as it relates to these petitions.

Here, we note that we are explicitly involving tribal historical

preservation officers and Native American scholars, including those

with links to Native tribes of New England. Especially but not only

when indigenous languages, histories and titles are involved, we will

be collaborating with the relevant tribes (see the Project Plan and the

Rights, Ethics and Re-Use document, as well as the tribal letters of

support, for further discussion and specifics). We also note that the

collaboration between Harvard and the Yale Indian Papers Project,

where Dr. Grant-Costa has undertaken extensive studies with Native

American petitions in the Northeast, rests upon a scholarly model

with deep roots in the study of Native American history in the region.

Sustainability doc CLIR 2015.pdf

CLIR_Letters_of_Institutional_Support_and_Tribal_

Support_20150929.pdf

Will special skills or training be required?

Explain the nature of any required skills or training to undertake the project and how the applicant institution

intends to solicit or provide it.

Sustainability

Digital Preservation and Discoverability Plan (max. 2 pages, 2 MB, .pdf format only)

Upload a digital preservation and discoverability plan explaining how project deliverables will be made secure and

discoverable for the long term.

Institutional Capacity

Upload a letter of support from the head administrator of the applicant institution.

Training

Preservation/Discoverability Plan

(.pdf format only)

Letter of Institutional Support


One source of institutional strength rests in the strengths of the team

at Harvard. Both the Principal Investigator and the Project Archivist

have considerable previous success in locating, processing, and

organizing the digitizing of thousands of anti-slavery petitions. In

February 2015, Harvard released the Digital Archive of Antislavery

and Anti-Segregation Petitions (available at

http://thedata.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/antislaverypetitionsma), in which

we made available to the public more than 3,500 anti-slavery

petitions, for which over 22,000 images from all of these petitions are

currently online. We have already produced a web-based interface,

based upon the Harvard Dataverse platform, so that citizens and

scholars can locate and use these petitions more easily. The

Harvard University Library also has abundant expertise in primary-

source digitization projects, and its partnerships with the Schlesinger

Library are well known and highly successful. For these reasons, the

Radcliffe Institute is enthusiastic about the possibility for further

collaboration with the MAC.

The Yale Indian Papers Project is a collaborative venture between

institutions with significant or rare Native resources—large

repositories (Yale University, Connecticut State Library, Connecticut

Historical Society, Massachusetts Archives, the National Archives

of the U.K., the British Library) and smaller ones like the New

London County Historical Society and Thomas Leffingwell House &

Museum. Editors work collaboratively with a broad array of

American, Native American, and British scholars to produce

research that is widely used in academic and tribal communities.

An NEH grant in 2010 allowed editors to publish political, religious,

economic, and military documents from the Colony of Connecticut

(1603-1783). Another NEH award in 2013 extends the documentary

corpus into the early American Republic era (1784-1869). The Project

is endorsed by the National Archives’ National Historical Publications

and Records Commission (2013).

Harvard University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and

the Yale Indian Papers Project have a long-demonstrated

commitment to digitizing and making publicly and freely available

documents and resources of immense cultural and historical value.

For further information, please consult the Technical Plan and the

Sustainability Plan document included in this application.

We take space to mention here that the Radcliffe Institute is

launching a multi-year initiative, in partnership with Harvard

University Native American Program, for educational and scholarly

programming in the Politics of Native American and Indigenous

Peoples. Considerable public programming for academic year 2015-

2016 has been scheduled, followed by a longer set of events that

Institutional Strengths

Describe the institutional strengths that justify the undertaking of the proposed project by the applicant (and any

collaborating partners). Strengths may include existing infrastructure, partnerships, professional associations,

staff experience, access to local expertise (scholars, volunteers, students), financial or other resources, etc.

Institutional Priorities

Describe the applicant's (and partners’) institutional priorities for digitization, digital collection development,

maximizing access, and supporting scholarship, learning, and/or the public good.

Institutional Strengths

Institutional Priorities


include visitors and conferences at Harvard Law School and other

faculties at the university. Professor Carpenter, the PI of this project,

sits on the Provost’s Council for Native American Issues at Harvard

and has begun active research in the field of Native American

politics and history, especially the history of Native American

petitioning.

Digital Archive of Antislavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions

(available at

http://thedata.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/antislaverypetitionsma)

First draft of interactive visualization, using contemporary maps, at

http://antislaverypetitions.pythonanywhere.com/map

Yale Indian Papers Project’s New England Indian Papers Series,

http://findit.library.yale.edu/yipp, available at the project’s website,

http://yipp.yale.edu.

Carpenter_CLIR_Budget_Narrative_20150925.pdf

Budget_CLIR_Template_20150925.xls

Prior Initiatives

Provide up to three examples of prior initiatives that demonstrate preparedness of the applicant institution(s) to

undertake project work.

Funding

Budget Documents

CLIR requires all applicants to complete and upload two budget documents:

Budget Narrative (click here for detailed information about the Budget Narrative). No page limit, max. 2MB,

.pdf format only.

Budget Detail (must be submitted using CLIR's Excel form; click here for detailed information about the

Budget Detail). Max. 2MB, .xls or .xlsx format only.

Subcontracts (No page limit, max. 5MB, .pdf format only)

Provide below any subcontracts for work associated with this project. Quotes from vendors may be provided in

lieu of more formal contract documents as necessary, as long as the relevant work to be conducted and costs

incurred are clearly delineated.

If your project will involve multiple subcontracts, combine them into one PDF document for upload into the

system.

Funding Allocations

Will funds from the grant be applied to current staff salaries or infrastructure? If so, justify the need to cover such

costs with external funds and their relevance to the proposed project.

Initiative #1

Initiative #2

Initiative #3

Budget Narrative (.pdf format only)

Budget Detail (.xls or .xlsx format

only)

Subcontract(s)


http://www.clir.org/hiddencollections/applicants/applicantguidelines.html#tab10

http://www.clir.org/hiddencollections/applicants/applicantbudgetform.xls

http://www.clir.org/hiddencollections/applicants/applicantguidelines.html#appendix--budget

No

We believe that a project digitizing Native American petitions is

uniquely suited to this funding program, which emphasizes greater

public access to currently hidden documents.

The collections are indeed hidden from public view, and indeed

hidden from the very peoples whose ancestors created these

documents. Just as important, we have already completed most of

the initial stages of work such as locating and cataloguing the

petitions, and if a CLIR grant is awarded, we will already have a

basic metadata resource completed with which we can move

immediately to digitization. In other words, the work of the archivist

can be limited to selection and scheduling of already known and

previously located materials for digitization.

We are currently exploring several other grant applications, including

to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the NHPRC of the

National Archives. We are also in talks with some Native American

organizations about how financial and personnel support might be

provided from communities whose members and leaders are deeply

interested in these documents and their heritage.

Harvard Proof of Non-Profit Status 501c3.pdf

Funding Justification

Explain why this project is uniquely suited to this funding program and how it reflects the program’s core values.

What prior efforts, if any, has the applicant made to identify other sources of funding for this project?

Applicant Information

Applicant Institution Address

In the event this proposal is approved for funding, payment will be made to the applicant institution as named at

the beginning of this application form, and will be mailed to the address listed here.

Proof of Nonprofit Status

Board/Trustee List (not required for colleges or universities; required for all other applicants)

Upload a current list of board or trustee members. The list must be on the applicant institution’s letterhead.

Yes/No

Justification

Nonprofit Status (Max. 2MB, .pdf

format only)

Board/Trustee List (Max. 2MB,

.pdf format only)


http://www.clir.org/hiddencollections/applicants

Contact Information

Provide the contact information for the proposed project's primary Principal Investigator(s) (PIs). The PI(s) will

take direct responsibility for completion of the project, should funds be awarded. He or she must be significantly

involved with the project's direction and execution and will be responsible for submitting required narrative and

financial reports to CLIR.

Note: Applicants may propose up to three PIs for their project. All applicants must assign at least one PI.

Information for co-PIs should be included below as applicable.

PI #3: Mr./Ms./Dr.

PI #3: First Name

PI #3: Last Name

PI #3: Title

PI #3: Institution

PI #3: Email

PI #3: Address

PI #3: City


Application Contact

If CLIR’s point of contact during the application period should be someone other than the proposed Principal

Investigator(s) (e.g. a grants administrator), enter the name and contact information for the relevant individual

here.

PI #3: State/Province

PI #3: Country

Application Contact: Mr./Ms./Dr.

Application Contact: First Name

Application Contact: Last Name

Application Contact: Title

Application Contact: Institution

Application Contact: Email

Application Contact: Address

Application Contact: City

Application Contact:

State/Province

Application Contact: Zip/Postal

Code

Application Contact: Country


All documents from the Massachusetts Archives of the Commonwealth and within the public domain.

Senate Unpassed 1791, Docket 1401, petition of Submit Wamsquam, Native American woman of Grafton, Hassanamisco tribe. In her petition, Submit stated, “…She has been for two years back deprived of her interest, and priviledge heretofore enjoyed, and where in consequence aforesaid the town of Grafton have deprived your petitioner of the priviledge of her going to public worship as heretofore, by selling the seats given to her Natives by a former grant of a former General Court and said Town of Grafton have converted the money to there own use, without the consent of the Natives of said Grafton.”

Senate Unpassed 1802, Docket 2838, portion of signature column on petitions from the Penobscot tribe.

Senate Unpassed 1804, Docket 3208, 3 images of a petition from the Herring Pond tribe concerning wood and access to resources, lands, and the Indian guardians.

Senate Unpassed 1832, Docket 9218, two images of a petition from the Herring Pond tribe on dams, encroachments, and other interruptions to fisheries.

Senate Unpassed 1849, Docket 12732, petition of George Copway or Kah-ge-ga-gah-Bowh, Ojibwa Nation.

Senate Unpassed 1870, Leave to Withdraw, numbered 1160, petition from the Mashpee tribe for the modification of Act 1869, chapter 463.

Massachusetts Archives Collection, Volume 187, Revolution Petitions, 1781-1782, pages 182-183, petition of Orino, the chief of the Penobscot Indians, for an allowance for money expended, services, delivery of letters.

Massachusetts Archives Collection, Volume 31, Indian, 1705-1750, pages 101-105, several images of signature column from representation in French (possibly a petition), with signatures from Iroquois, Huron, Abenaki, and Algonquin tribe members, July 28, 1721.

The Digital Archive of Massachusetts Native American Petitions Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Rights, Ethics and Re-Use Statement

The documents we seek to digitize for this project are legally within the public domain. There are, at

present, no formal access restrictions upon their use. Still, we acknowledge the sensitivity of

particular documents in the context of Native American history, and we recognize the sovereignty of

Native American peoples, not least in matters of their government. For this reason, we discuss

particular ethical and access issues involved in this project.

We note first that we have a working agreement with the Massachusetts Archives of the

Commonwealth to move forward with this project, but aside from the particular issues that will arise

in discussions with Native American tribes, there are absolutely no legal or organizational

restrictions (other than conservation issues, which will be greatly reduced if not solved entirely by

digitization) upon any document that we will target for digitization.

Our project will follow the Society of American Archivists’ (SAA) Native American Protocols for

Archival Materials (http://www2.nau.edu/libnap-p/protocols.html), including (but not limited to)

its prescriptions on the following subjects:

• Building Relationships of Mutual Respect, and Awareness of Native American

Communities and Issues – The SAA’s Native American Protocols suggest that

“Meaningful consultation and concurrence are essential to establishing mutually beneficial

practices and trust.” Our work throughout this project will be conducted in consultation

with, indeed in collaboration with, the Native American tribes whose peoples are

represented in these documents. We have already consulted several tribes – see the tribal

letters of recommendation attached to our institutional letters of support – and we will

consult with more of them as the project progresses. The tribes with whom we have

discussed the matter are eager to see the digitization of these documents, and are informed

that we will discuss historically sensitive materials, including place-names, with them before

making documents public or before assigning geo-locators to particular place-names

mentioned in petitions.

Our model of collaboration includes the involvement of tribal officials, including tribal

historic preservation officers, in the launch of the project, in the identification of culturally

sensitive materials, in the ceremonial re-opening of selected documents, and in the outreach

and utilization of deliverables (e.g., how to use the Digital Archive in teaching and research).

Tribal members themselves often possess the necessary historical and cultural expertise to

interpret, transcribe and translate documents. We have proposed a transcription budget as

part of this grant. We have made known to the tribes, and they have agreed, that where

CLIR and Harvard funds are used to support transcription work, the results of that work

must be in the public domain.

• Accessibility and Use. While petitions were sent by Native Americans in an effort to

convey their arguments and identity to the legislature, and were intended to be read by a

broad public, we are aware that some issues of historical sensitivity may still arise with these

documents. Moreover, given the troubling colonial and imperial histories associated with

Native Americans and their cultural materials, we believe it is important to include here a

discussion of access issues that may arise for culturally and historically sensitive materials.1

The tribes with which we have discussed the project are eager to see these materials digitized

(see the letters of tribal support). Several tribal officials have mentioned their concern that

geocoding of particular places mentioned in a petition, such as burial grounds, may pose

threats to preservation. We will agree to discuss any such historically or culturally sensitive

place names with the relevant tribes before digitization and to geocode only the township

origin of the petition, as was originally planned and as was conducted in the Digital Archive

of Massachusetts Antislavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions for a different set of petitions.

We strongly support this policy, not only in accordance with the SAA protocols but also in

accordance with our collaborative relationship with the tribes. We also believe that it is

highly unlikely that this policy will preclude access to documents, as our preliminary perusal

of Native American petitions suggests that there are but several petitions among thousands

where these place-names are an issue, and the existence of sensitive place-names within the

petition does not preclude the geocoding of the larger village or township from which it was

sent.

We note, finally, that all access restrictions to the physical documents are the ultimate

authority of the Massachusetts Archives of the Commonwealth, and if the Archives decides

that significant access restrictions accompany a particular document, then it is quite possible

that the document will not be digitized. (This is not different from other policies in which

the Massachusetts Archives of the Commonwealth, which has a long-term working

relationship with the Native American tribes of New England, as well as other peoples

represented in the documents it holds, may decide to limit access to historical materials.)

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

1 We acknowledge the reviewers from the first round of the CLIR proposal submission for alerting us to, and clarifying, many of these issues.

• Dealing with Culturally Sensitive Materials. In our discussions with tribes, they have

mentioned the place-names discussed in petitions as being of concern, especially if the

petition mentions a highly contested land claim or burial grounds, for instance. Since we are

proposing geocoding of the meta-data, at least one tribe mentioned that geocoding of this

information may be of concern.

It is for this reason that we have checked the box that “Some of the content within the

collections nominated for digitization contains private or other potentially sensitive

information that poses legal or ethical concerns related to providing access to the digital

copies created through this project.”

As we anticipate this issue to arise in but a handful of thousands of the petitions, and as it

will not preclude geocoding the general village or township origin of the petition, we do not

anticipate that this issue will materially detract from the quality, value or breadth of the

Digital Archive, or restrict any considerable amount of material from public access.

• Copying and Repatriation of Records to Native American Communities. We will

provide digital copies of the entire database to any interested tribe. We have decided to

discuss the provision of paper copies on a case-by-case basis, given environmental concerns

that are shared by both the tribes and by the investigators. As the materials are the property

of the Massachusetts Archives of the Commonwealth under state law, we are not proposing

repatriation as part of this project, nor have the tribes expressed interest in this option.

Space limitations prevent a full listing of all activities we plan or could undertake in consultation and

collaboration with the tribes, but we note that three tribes have already signed on to our project as

formal sponsors. We also note that, in accordance with the establishment and maintenance of

relationships of mutual respect, our discussions with the tribes will continue and relevant issues will

be discussed as they are mutually encountered and respectfully discussed.

Finally, it is important to note several limitations on our ability to consult with all affected Native

American communities. First, the Native American petitions materials are often not separately

identified and are mixed with other legislative materials. Hence the work of the Archivist – Ms.

Nicole Topich – will be necessary to identify petitions before they are discussed. Ms. Topich has

already agreed to begin consultation with relevant tribes when a new petition authored by that

Native Nation is found, and in a number of cases she has already alerted tribal leaders to the

presence of petitions that were not previously catalogued or known. Second, we have identified

over 70 different Native American tribal and nation names in these petitions, and it may be difficult

to reach all of them, given that Native American communities have migrated and/or have been

forcibly removed and dispossessed over time. However, it is our firm intention to identify relevant

Native nations whenever possible and to consult with them actively as the project proceeds.

Project Plan for the Digital Archive of Native American Petitions in Massachusetts

Project Grant History, Scope, and Duration, including Work Plan

Because this project employs methods developed and honed in the creation of the Digital Archive of Massachusetts Antislavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions, we integrate the history of that project seamlessly with the development of the Digital Archive of Native American Petitions in Massachusetts.

Summer 2012 to Summer 2014– Digitization of Massachusetts Anti-Slavery and Anti-Segregation

Petitions and Creation of Scalable Digital Archive. Collection of slavery-related petitions from the 24th through 28th Congresses; digitization of several dozen selected petitions from 24th and 25th Congresses; cleaning and analysis of database. Geocoding of National Archives anti-slavery petitions completed (see Appendix) and preliminary research on crowdsourcing and mTurk technologies for crowdsourced transcription of petition prayers and signatory lists. [Funded by NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Grant (PW-5105612), the Institutional Development Initiative, the Behavioral Laboratory in the Social Sciences (BLISS), the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University, and by fellowships to Professor Carpenter from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, 2007-2008].

Summer 2014 to Spring 2015– Creation of Text Files from Digital Petition Images and Programming

and Completion of Database, -

. In the last months of the previous project, as the cataloguing and digitization of the petitions was completed, a programmer was employed to complete the digital archive. The Digital Archive of Massachusetts Antislavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions was launched at the end of February 2015 and is now available at http://thedata.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/antislaverypetitionsma [Funding: RIAS, Institutional Development Initiative and Center for American Political Studies, Harvard University].

Summer 2015 to End of 2015 [Third and Fourth Quarters of 2015, First Quarter of 2016] –Discussions with Native American Communities in the New England Region. Discussion of the project with tribal officials, including but not limited to tribal chiefs and chairpersons, as well as tribal historical preservation officers, has begun. These discussions concerned the project outline and proposals for tribal collaboration, as well as the possibility of involving tribal historical officers in research, transcription and, where relevant, translation of petition language expressed in phoneticized indigenous languages (such as Wampanoag).

Winter 2016 [First Quarter of 2016] – Planning Meetings with Native American Communities in the

New England Region. If the grant is awarded, we will hold planning meetings that include tribal representatives and tribal historic preservation officers. As much as possible, we have committed to travel to tribal lands to hold these meetings. We will discuss all aspects of the project, including metadata and transcription.

January 2016 to July 2016 [First and Second Quarters of 2016] – Identification, Cataloging, and Digitization of Native American Petitions in Massachusetts Petitions on Archives. [Funding: Proposed use of this grant’s funding and cost-sharing from Harvard University.] After initial planning meetings among the Project Staff and with tribal representatives (see above), the project archivist will begin formal work on this project. (Initial cataloguing and identification of Native American petitions in the MAC has already begun, in combination with the Archivist’s review of other MAC collections.)

The Project Archivist’s work will continue our existing partnership with the MAC by beginning to systematically identify, rehouse, catalog, and digitize all petitions from or relating to Native Americans in the MAC passed and unpassed legislative collections. These documents and data will be added to the public database and geo-encoded in the same processes utilized for the anti-slavery and anti-segregation petitions. These processes will begin with the review and identification of relevant materials from the MAC passed legislative collections, 1780 to 1870, then will move to colonial records (1640s to 1780). Throughout the project, extensive research will continue with these materials and further academic works will be developed for publication, events, and presentations. The project archivist and principal investigator will begin identification of documents for inclusion in popular publications and curriculum materials.

January 2016 to July 2016 [First and Second Quarters of 2016] – Continued Meetings with

Native American Tribes. In the first year of the grant, we will meet continually with Native American tribes to discuss the launch and conduct of the research. Here we describe those meetings that precede digitization. We will meet with Native American tribal representatives to discuss issues of tribal collaboration, any issues arising from the identification of culturally or historically sensitive materials, possible celebratory openings of documents at the Massachusetts Archives of the Commonwealth, and linguistic or cultural issues that will need to be discussed in preparation for transcription and interpretation of the petitions at the Yale Indian Papers Project.

July 2016 to January 2017 [Third and Fourth Quarters of 2016] – Digitization of Native

American petitions by Imaging Services begins. [Funding: Proposed use of this grant’s funding and cost-sharing from Harvard University.] Materials are digitized and deposited into the Digital Repository Service. Digital objects are reviewed for completeness by the project archivist prior to return to the MAC. The project archivist will complete the cataloging for the Native American petitions from the passed legislative collections from 1780 to 1870.

October 2016 to June 2017 [Third Quarter of 2016 and two Quarters following] – Discussion

of Transcription and Beginning of Transcription. [Funding: Proposed use of this grant’s funding and cost-sharing from Harvard University.] Led by Dr. Grant-Costa and the staff of the Yale Indian Papers Project (YIPP), the principal investigators will meet with tribal officials and will select an initial subsample of petitions deemed most appropriate for initial transcription. Any materials involving phoneticized indigenous languages or using Native American proper names and/or titles will be identified and discussed with the relevant tribal representatives, including tribal historic and preservation officers.

Transcription will be led by the Yale Indian Papers Project, whose officials have a long-

standing record of successful collaboration with tribal governments and tribal historic preservation officers. YIPP staff will meet with Radcliffe-based collaborators to discuss the incorporation of transcriptions and translations into the eventual web interface of the Digital Archive.

January 2017 to April 2017 [First Quarter of 2017] – Continuation of Cataloging and Digitization.

[Funding: Proposed use of this grant’s funding and cost-sharing from Harvard University.] The cataloging and digitization of Native American petitions in the passed and unpassed legislation at the MAC from the 1640s to 1780 will be completed by the end of April 2017.

May 2017 through June 2017 – Completion of Database, Geocoding of Petition Origins, and

Development of Digital Archive Interface [Second Quarter of 2017]. [Funding: Proposed use of this grant’s funding and cost-sharing from Harvard University.] With all images having been taken and stored, and all metadata completed, the final two months of project work will consist of creating a digital interface for the Native American petitions collections, housed at Harvard’s Dataverse and mirrored

at the Yale Indian Papers Project. YIPP, Radcliffe and tribal officials will meet to discuss the incorporation of transcription and translation materials into the Digital Archive Interface.

After data cleaning is complete, we will generate latitude and longitude data for each petition – as in the Digital Archive of Massachusetts antislavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/antislaverypetitionsma) – to permit incorporation of data on each petition’s geographic context. In the Digital Archive of Antislavery and Anti-segregation Petitions, nearly all petitions contained place name information at one of two geographic levels. Our early expectation is that at least two-thirds Native American petitions will also contain information on origin of the document.

Because generating shapefiles of political and administrative entities is beyond the scope of this project, we will exploit existing geographic references using commercial geocoding software. The ArcGIS geocoding tool permits geocoding of petitions’ town, city, and county locations using present-day town location data, a process that introduces a small amount of measurement error. As a final pass on remaining uncoded places, we will apply pattern matching to link town names in the petition data to archaic and informal place names kept by the USGS Board of Geographic Names.

As an example of initial work with geocoding petitions from the Digital Archive of Antislavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions, please consult the draft web interface for that Digital Archive at http://antislaverypetitions.pythonanywhere.com/map (accessed September 28, 2015). We will continue to work on updating the map interface so that it reflects historically accurate geographies. (One major challenge is endowing the map with interactive capabilities, which is more difficult when using multiple shapefiles intended to represent a database that spans centuries.) While this initial version uses contemporary maps of Massachusetts, we have noted a tight correspondence with maps generated from historical GIS shapefiles.

We expect that geocoding and database completion will not take much time (3-5 weeks)

because we already have code and routines that have been stored from the creation and interface development of the Digital Archive of Massachusetts antislavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions.

May 2017 through end of June 2017 and completion of project. Scholarly and

educational publications, presentations, and guides will continue for outreach and accessibility to the project. Events will be held and publicity generated for the completion of the database, which will showcase the cataloging and related publications, guides, and presentations based on the work.

At this time, next-stage meetings with Native American tribes will continue, at which

outreach, cultural and education efforts will be discussed and planned, both for Native American communities in New England and for Native and non-Native audiences nationwide.

Collection Title Collection Size Holding Institution

Institution/Staff Responsible for Digitization

Institution/Staff Responsible for Description

Institution/Staff Responsible for Quality Control

Institution/Staff Responsible for Long-Term Maintenance

When in the course of the project will this collection be processed?

Individual Petitions from Passed Acts, 1777-2009

207 cubic feet Massachusetts Archives of the Commonwealth

Harvard University Library Imaging Services Department

Project Archivist Project Archivist Harvard University Library Imaging Services Department

Prior to digitization

Individual Petitions from Passed Resolves, 1777-2009





Individual Petitions from Massachusetts Archives, 1603-1799





Individual Petitions from House Unpassed Legislation, 1775-2008

Unknown Massachusetts Archives of the Commonwealth




Individual Petitions from Senate Unpassed Legislation, 1780-2008

Unknown Massachusetts Archives of the Commonwealth




Individual Petitions from Governor Council Files, 1784-1983

90.17 cubic feet Massachusetts Archives of the Commonwealth




Project Technical Plan

Methodology and Standards

The Dataverse Network: This is an open-source application and repository for sharing, citing, analyzing and preserving research data, in collaboration with the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, the Harvard Library, Harvard University Information Technology and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). All data created by the project will be stored and accessible through the Dataverse website.

Use of Central Library Infrastructure: The Harvard University Library (HUL) centrally managed systems infrastructure will accommodate all digitized images for this project. The HUL systems include a suite of independent but cooperating services that together provide a comprehensive foundation for preservation, storage, and digital content management, as well as for online discovery and delivery. Key services leveraged for this project will include the following:

Digital Repository Service (DRS): The DRS is a repository for both preservation and access that provides professionally managed services to ensure the usability of stored digital objects over time. DRS services and facilities include: (1) a secure electronic storage facility; (2) management of administrative and structural metadata; and (3) digital preservation: objects received the highest level of preservation service consistent with their characteristics. All digital images created for this project will be stored in the DRS, with a previous commitment from Harvard to pay ongoing annual costs to sustain use of these materials as part of Professor Carpenter’s broader, long term research projects on petitions.

Name Resolution Service (NRS): NRS is a service for creating, maintaining, and resolving persistent identifiers (also called names or URNs). Persistent identifiers provide curators and researchers with confidence that the URL they cite will always work. A URN will be created for each petition in the project, resolving to the stored object in DRS and presenting it to users via the discovery and delivery services described below.

Page Delivery Service (PDS): PDS delivers to a web browser scanned page images of documents. Documents delivered by PDS can be browsed through a table of contents or viewed page-by-page. PDS also offers: tools to manipulate pages (zoom, rotate, pan); full-text keyword searching; and an option to generate PDFs for printing. Petitions digitized for this project will be delivered through the PDS.

Hollis Catalog: This is the main bibliographic catalog at Harvard, which will contain a description of the collection developed for this project as a whole, with a link to the project’s database and website.

JPEG 2000 format: The JPEG2000 format is a fully supported preservation format in the Harvard University Library’s Digital Repository Service (DRS). The DRS now manages millions of JPEG2000 images, including all copies of Harvard materials digitized by Google. DRS assumes full preservation services for these files, equal to the services offered for TIFF images. We are adopting lossless JPEG2000 for this project, due to advanced performance capabilities and preservation. The JPEG2000 format enables users to zoom in and out and rotate images, and the cost savings for image storage is substantial – a conservative estimate has lossless compressed JPEG2000 images at 40% of the size of uncompressed TIFF images. As Harvard will be taking on the ongoing cost of preserving these images there is a need to manage the costs. By managing the number of gigabytes, we

can maximize images created and the number of years of longevity per dollar. JPEG2000 is now the most adopted format for digital still images by Harvard repositories, and its use has exceeded that of TIFF images. The Smithsonian Libraries has started converting archival TIFFs to JPEG2000 and it is in use by the Internet Archive, the British Library, and the Library of Congress.

Digitization: The project archivist, working at the Massachusetts State Archives, will prepare all materials for transport and digitization by ensuring that each selected page is unfolded and rehoused to balance needs for safe handling and high production. Continuing the digitization workflows from the previous NEH project will ensure the production of standards-compliant page images and structural metadata files that together compromise complete, properly sequenced, and navigable digital objects in web-based delivery services.

Digitization will be done on a fee for-service basis by Imaging Services of the Preservation and Digital Imaging Group of the Harvard Library. This department has a state of the art digitization facility and has been digitizing special collections materials from the Harvard libraries and outside institutions in collaborative projects for over ten years. Imaging Services offers a broad range of collections reformatting services all designed to protect endangered library materials and extend scholarly access. Imaging Services’ photographers and imaging technicians are trained and supervised by a management team with over 15 years of experience in the digitization of library and museum materials. All photographers and technicians are trained by conservators in the handling of special collections materials.

The petitions will be digitized in sections at TTI Copy Stands, using a Canon EOS 1DS MK3 SLR with Zeiss Macro lens and either Broncolor flash lighting or TTI 5000k UV/IR filtered fan cooled quartz halogen lighting. The images will be captured at 400 dpi and be processed in batches to closely match the original materials using color and tonal corrections derived from a representative sample. Lossless JPEG2000 files, a fully supported preservation format in the Harvard University Library’s Digital Repository Service (DRS), will be created and deposited to DRS to serve as both archival master and delivery images. Image files will be inspected by the library staff and project archivist to assure both quality and consistency.

As the most cost effective approach for the digitization of the petitions has a size limitation of 11 x 17 inches for 400 dpi capture, and the petitions vary in size depending on the text size, many images may be needed to capture a complete petition. A small amount of overlap will be captured when multiple shots are taken, assuring the user of complete capture as they move through multiple pages in the PDS. Imaging Services staff will also assist with the descriptive and structural metadata needed to deliver the digitized petitions through PDS. Before the digital photography, spreadsheets will be created by the project archivist that will become XML files that comply with the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS). Each METS file will be assigned a persistent name from the NRS and will be deposited to DRS to ensure long-term storage and access.

Database development for discovery and access. The public database and web interface—which is being developed and to which this project will add—is the property of Harvard University and will be provided freely to the public. Once the project has been completed, Harvard University will support ongoing open access and long-term storage to the public database and website, which will ensure sustainability to public access. Funding has been provided by the NEH for web hosting for three years, and additional funds are

available through Harvard and the IQSS for decades of web hosting. Use of the Harvard University Library (HUL) centrally managed systems infrastructure, including the Digital Repository Service and database, will ensure long-term preservation and access to the descriptive data and digital images created in this project. The HUL systems include services that together provide a comprehensive foundation for preservation, storage, and digital content management, as well as online discovery and delivery. The HUL centrally managed systems infrastructure will accommodate all data collected and created in this project.

Each record in the database will refer to single petition. Each record will include at a minimum the following information and will include a link to the digitized petitions: (1) location and citation of the document (2) the date of the petition, (3) the village, township, tribe or Native nation from which the petition was sent, (4) the subject of the text or prayer of the petition, (5) the number of signatories on the petition with the number of women, men, and other identified groups separately listed, (6) whether the females signed in separate columns from males, (7) the Native American tribes, villages or nations with which the petition was concerned, and other vectors of information.

Sustainability

The public database and web interface—which is being developed and to which this project will add—is the property of Harvard University and will be provided freely to the public. Once the project has been completed, Harvard University will support ongoing open access and long-term storage to the public database and website, which will ensure sustainability to public access. Funding has been provided by the NEH for web hosting for three years, and additional funds are available through Professor Carpenter’s research funding for decades of web hosting. Use of the Harvard University Library (HUL) centrally managed systems infrastructure, including the Digital Repository Service and database, will ensure long-term preservation and access to the descriptive data and digital images created in this project. The HUL systems include services that together provide a comprehensive foundation for preservation, storage, and digital content management, as well as online discovery and delivery. The HUL centrally managed systems infrastructure will accommodate all data collected and created in this project.

Some of the many Digital Archives that are maintained using the HUL digital infrastructure include:

The Digital Archive of Massachusetts Antislavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions: http://thedata.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/antislaverypetitionsma

The Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:hpsoviet

The Iranian Oral History Project: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:iohpdigi

The Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:milparco

The Latin American Pamphlet Virtual Collections: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:latampdc

Digital Preservation and Discoverability Plan The Digital Archive of Native American Petitions in Massachusetts Database development for discovery and access. The public database and web interface—which is being developed and to which this project will add—is the property of Harvard University and will be provided freely to the public. Once the project has been completed, Harvard University will support ongoing open access and long-term storage to the public database and website, which will ensure sustainability to public access. Funding has been provided by the NEH for web hosting for three years, and additional funds are available through Harvard and the IQSS for decades of web hosting. Use of the Harvard University Library (HUL) centrally managed systems infrastructure, including the Digital Repository Service and database, will ensure long-term preservation and access to the descriptive data and digital images created in this project. The HUL systems include services that together provide a comprehensive foundation for preservation, storage, and digital content management, as well as online discovery and delivery. The HUL centrally managed systems infrastructure will accommodate all data collected and created in this project.

Each record in the database will refer to a single petition. Each record will include at a minimum the following information and will include a link to the digitized petitions: (1) location and citation of the document (2) the date of the petition, (3) the village, tribe or nation from which the petition was sent, (4) the subject of the text or prayer of the petition, (5) the number of signatories on the petition with the number of women, men, and other identified groups separately listed, (6) whether the females signed in separate columns from males, (7) the Native American villages, tribes and communities mentioned in the petition, and other vectors of information.

Sustainability

The public database and web interface—which is being developed and to which this project will add—is the property of Harvard University and will be provided freely to the public. Once the project has been completed, Harvard University will support ongoing open access and long-term storage to the public database and website, which will ensure sustainability to public access. Funding has been provided by the NEH for web hosting for three years, and additional funds are available through Professor Carpenter’s research funding for decades of web hosting. Use of the Harvard University Library (HUL) centrally managed systems infrastructure, including the Digital Repository Service and database, will ensure long-term preservation and access to the descriptive data and digital images created in this project. The HUL systems include services that together provide a comprehensive foundation for preservation, storage, and digital content management, as well as online discovery and delivery. The HUL centrally managed systems infrastructure will accommodate all data collected and created in this project. The Digital Archive will be hosted at Dataverse (www.dataverse.org), whose perpetual hosting policies are well known and underwritten by Harvard University. The sustainability of the Digital Archive is in no way dependent upon the careers of the principal investigators. The preservation policies of Harvard are described at http://best-

http://www.dataverse.org/

http://best-practices.dataverse.org/data-management/index.html

practices.dataverse.org/data-management/index.html and http://best-practices.dataverse.org/harvard-policies/harvard-preservation-policy.html. Some of the many Digital Archives that are maintained using the HUL digital infrastructure include:

The Digital Archive of Massachusetts Antislavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions: http://thedata.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/antislaverypetitionsma

The Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:hpsoviet

The Iranian Oral History Project: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:iohpdigi

The Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:milparco

The Latin American Pamphlet Virtual Collections: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:latampdc

Sustainability in Education. We are currently planning a long-term collaboration between Harvard/Radcliffe and the Yale Indian Papers Project on the creation of scholarly and educational resources and platforms for Native American petitioning and politics. This includes, at its core, digitization of Native American petitions in other areas, including other state and local archives in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions. We also hope to link up the various databases of Native petitions to create a common media platform where the images can be searched, where scholars and students can make linkages across the documents and across Native American histories and people, and where educational and scholarly materials can be produced, enhanced and diffused. Our collaboration will embed an educational component (including outreach to Native American communities, including tribal leaders and elders and Native American organizations) as well as a research component (including outreach to tribal historians, scholars of Native American Studies and American history as well as in other fields). None of these future initiatives will be able to succeed without building an initial digital archive that can (a) serve as a model for future efforts, (b) serve as a resource for building scholarly resources and a corpus of research on Native American petitions, and (c) serve as a platform for the development and enhancement of educational materials for the teaching of Native American history and culture, as well as American history generally. In the realm of education, the annual Summer Institute on the American Republic will ensure that there is an ongoing program of outreach to teachers in the Boston public school system. In the future, as we extend this program to other school systems in the state of Massachusetts, the petitions archive will be presented to teachers in these venues as well. At Harvard, Professor Carpenter and other scholars will use the digital archive of petitions in their courses (both graduate and undergraduate), and Professor Carpenter plans to offer a “J Term” (January term, three week) course in several years on “Petitions in America,” which will include an archival research component for Harvard College students.

http://best-practices.dataverse.org/data-management/index.html

http://best-practices.dataverse.org/harvard-policies/harvard-preservation-policy.html

http://best-practices.dataverse.org/harvard-policies/harvard-preservation-policy.html

http://thedata.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/antislaverypetitionsma

http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:hpsoviet

http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:hpsoviet

http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:iohpdigi

http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:milparco

http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:milparco

http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:latampdc

http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:latampdc

Project Summary - ARMACAD 2017...2015/02/02 · Digital Archive of Massachusetts Antislavery and...

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